On Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:43:21 -0700, Bruce Miller <bruce.miller@nist.gov>
wrote:
> The proposal seems to be something like:
> an HTML5 page with MathML-ish stuff in it.
> The math in the _text_ of the page (1) emphatically
> does not have the MathML namespace, (2) may have omitted
> end tags, (3) doesn't have empty elements marked as <tag/>,
> (4) may have attribute values that aren't quoted,
> (5) may be limited to exclude <semantics> and named entities,
> (6) and may in the extreme case, even omit tags for token
> elements (<mo>,<mi>,<mn>).
> Did I miss anything?
I don't think it was proposed that declaring xmlns on the <math> would be
disallowed. Just that it would not have any effect. The same goes for the
other parts of the proposal I think. That is, you may mark empty elements
as <tag />, you may quote attribute values if you want, etc. I would also
expect named entities to be included.
> Now, that math is clearly not the serialization of Classic MathML, nor
> would it be allowable to put Classic MathML in the HTML5;
> Correct so far?
I would expect a subset of the "Classic MathML serialization" to work
as-is in HTML5. Again, I don't believe anybody proposed otherwise.
> OTOH, even in the more extreme case, there's no
> reason the DOM in the browser created by the HTML5
> parser would be any different than the DOM that
> would have been created by an XML parser parsing
> Classic MathML.
> Correct?
I think the answer here is yes, though it's not entirely clear to me what
the "extreme case" refers to.
> Would this actually be a _requirement_ in the HTML5 spec?
The HTML5 specification would dicate what input leads to what output. So I
think the answer is yes, if I followed you correctly. :-)
> Clearly, such a DOM could be serialized as
> either Classic MathML or HTML5-MathML.
Right.
> [...]
>
> Requiring every MathML importer to include an
> HTML5 parser, and every MathML exporter to
> include an HTML5 serializer just seems like
> a quadratic version of the old joke:
> "Now you've got _two_ problems".
Well, if we want MathML in text/html we'll need to have some amount of
syntax differences. So we'll always have this problem. I would expect that
over time the tools will support both serializations, but also that
browsers provide UI features to make this task easier. I don't expect
HTML5 to mandate any one of those UI features though.
--
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>